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The Superior Motif?
Janon writes: "There's a rather interesting interview with Antony Fountain, a Motif developer and reference manual author at O'Reilly. He makes some rather well-founded (or at least it seems so to me) claims that Motif has some rather important advantages over the likes of GTK+ and Qt, such as an open and superior component model." It's a great illustration of the split between open and closed development, too -- fans of the Bazaar may see only waste in Fountains assertion that "Millions of lines of Motif get written and not one word about it leaves the company doors."
At the time I used a memory debugger called "purify", that detected all sorts of memory errors (acesses out of bunds, buffer overruns, buffer underruns, acesses to dealocated blocks, memory leaks, etc.), and It reported thousands of errors inside the motif libraries.
There were all kinds of errors from memory blocks accessed after being freed to memory leaks.
The problem was so bad that even the documentation from "purify" had a paragraph explaining how to filter the error messages caused by the Motif code, because otherwise it was impossible to spot our own bugs.
I beleive that this problem still persists today and this is one of the reasons that explains why Netscape Navigator keeps crashing so many times.
Right now, I'm porting all my applications to GTK+ with the help of Glade.
So far, I'm using "njamd" as a memory debugger and it doesn't detect any problems ou memory leaks.
The interview takes a rather dark tone WRT GTK and QT. It's clear that Fountain likes Motif, but at the expense of his own vision.
He doesn't offer any interesting insight why motif is neccessarily better, other than: "We can write proprietary applications and people won't talk about them".
Well, duh! You can write proprietary apps with any widget manager you like! GTK isn't encumbered with any legal virii.
If Joe Schmoe Corporation wanted to make a GTK interface for an internal CVS repository application, then they can.
He acts as if using GTK automatically entitles the GTK group to announce your application on Slashdot and toot their own horns. I'll give you a clue: It's the app builders that toot horns, not the GTK peeps.
If Joe Schmoe Corporation doesn't want their horn tooted, then they'll just keep the shut up!
The reality of the situation is that Motif only exists because of corporations that believe they have to use a proprietary, expensively licensed, widget library in their applications, or they won't be taken seriously.
I seem to recall that Netscape first built on Linux, unencumbered, when LessTif was stable enough to permit linking. That was because LessTif was trying to mimick the Motif API in Open Source. Then GTK came along and it seems the drive behind Lesstif is lessened.
Don't let the FUD mongers that want to see Motif remain a cash cow distract companies from using GTK or QT as their widget of choice.